Sudhakar Shetty
Founder & Managing Director, Max Talent. Built Max Talent from a personal gap he noticed in youth cricket into a pathway that has produced four U19 World Cup players and helped take UAE Women all the way to World Cup qualification.
2006
4
Academy players who reached the U19 World Cup
Max Talent founded in Dubai
Coming back to the fold
"I thought — let me come back to my world of passion, to the world I've always been involved in." Sudhakar was active in sport from early childhood, and after roughly two decades in corporate business and distribution, he decided it was time to return to what he loved most. The trigger was close to home: his own son went on to play for the UAE national team, and taking him to academy sessions, Sudhakar noticed a gap in how youth cricket programs were being run — one that could be filled differently.
His vision took shape as Max Talent in 2006 — an academy built around discipline, principle, and a genuinely organized structure, with a real concern for children's physical development alongside their game. As it grew, overseas tours and clinics with professional cricketers became part of the pathway for its players. Noticing that inter-school cricket tournaments, once run locally, had quietly disappeared, Sudhakar launched the Vision Cup: a Pan-UAE inter-school tournament for both boys and girls, which later expanded into a Pan-UAE Inter-University Cricket Tournament and regular inter-academy competitions across every age group. That pipeline is now paying off: the UAE women's national team has qualified for the upcoming Women's Cricket World Cup.
Giving back, the way it was given to him
Sudhakar describes himself as "a great product" of the inter-pool cricket tournaments of his own youth — and building the Vision Cup was his way of restoring that same opportunity for the next generation.
Vision Cup — Boys' Inter-School
A Pan-UAE inter-school cricket tournament, created after Sudhakar noticed the format had disappeared from the local calendar.
Vision Cup — Girls' Edition
Run in parallel with the boys' tournament, giving young women in UAE schools a genuine competitive platform to showcase their skill.
An extension of the same idea into university cricket, alongside ongoing inter-academy tournaments across every age category.
Pan-UAE Inter-University Cup
"With gratitude, and a big thanks to the sporting society that supported us — the members who always stood by us, a bit more than we did for them."
Sudhakar Shetty — Founder & Managing Director, Max Talent